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He arrived the day the first apples fell, sure as rain. Cheeks flushed, eyes bruised. A knife wound in his side, bleeding red. They were all accustomed to blood, of course, but it still triggered something instinctual in them, something that had felt forgotten. Dan and Renee set him up on the kitchen table and procured towels, hot water. Abby stood in the corner and tried to keep her voice down as she gave orders. Wymack stepped outside with shaking hands; Andrew gave him a cigarette and ignored the way his own body shook. Neil didn’t make a single sound. He was so quiet that the crickets could still be heard from outside, steady like breathing, the most familiar sound in the whole world.
"I can't," he started sometimes, at the dining table, in the garden. "I can't tell you. It's not –"
"It's all right, son." Wymack always said. "Better just to leave it with the dust and the stars. No need to pay penance for it."
Penance came, nonetheless. Early mornings in the garden before anyone was awake, collecting sprouts and tomatoes and raspberries for breakfast, still wet with dew. Long trips to the village to get supplies for Abby when Wymack had the horses, afternoons with Kevin tending to the beehives, ignoring the sunburn growing a second skin on his arms and face.
The first time they kissed, Andrew pulled back. “Don’t make me part of your absolution. I won't do this with you if you don't actually want it." They were sitting next to the dying fire, after everyone had gone to bed.
"That's not what this is.”
“This isn’t anything.”
Neil looked at the stars. They were bright and heavy, swelling with the promise of May, of a clear morning, of a growing moon. He smiled, and it could have been because of the stars, but it was really because of Andrew. “You make me feel like I’ve already been forgiven.”
“You didn’t need forgiveness in the first place.”
"When you say that I actually believe you."
"I don't lie, remember."
"No. You don't."
They kissed again, then. It felt like a second promise, aside from the one made on Neil's first night there. The one that said: you're here, and this is family, and you don't need to say anything to stay. This one said: I'm here, I'm here.
Wymack wouldn't call it an orphanage, because they were all adults. But they were orphans, collected like stamps across a strange country that didn’t belong to them. Andrew had been deployed at seventeen. Technically, this wasn't allowed. But they'd needed bodies and he’d needed a way out, so it was easy enough to pull it off. His foster brother had pulled a few strings to get him deployed to the same base as him, and it was there that Andrew had learned what real fear felt like; where it settled in your stomach and your throat, how it grew new teeth for you and sent you to the wolves snapping your jaw, desperate and ugly. He'd put himself in front of a bullet. Lots of kids did it. It was easy to die on purpose when it was hard to stay alive on purpose.
But it only got his leg, and his doctor happened to be a twin he hadn't known existed.
Each of them had a story like this, in one way or another. Andrew still had a limp, and needed a cane when it rained or he stood for too long. They all had something like that too, in one way or another.
Neil never said if he'd gone overseas. He had scars, which he tried to keep covered, a fruitless task in the August heat and the tight living quarters they all shared. But his scars weren't the same as everyone else's. His felt personal. Matt had never seen the face that had shot him in the shoulder, or Allison the man who had killed Seth, but Neil looked at his body the way a ghost would, as though reliving the ways it'd felt to be betrayed. The ways it felt to lose your body to another's hate. In this way, Andrew could relate.
"You're going to fall."
"Have some trust."
Kevin kicked a fallen apple. "Says you."
Andrew watched them bicker from the branches. The sun wasn’t as warm as it had been from the ground; it peeked in and out of the leaves, flickering with a gentle wind that smelled like whatever flowers Renee had decided to plant that year. Lavender, peony. If he closed his eyes the sun made patterns in the darkness behind his eyelids, like milk poured in coffee, swirling and warm. Neil’s laugh rang out like July, like relief, like the best sound in the entire world. He settled in beside Andrew on the branch, nestling his back against the sturdy trunk of the tree.
“Nice view,” he said. His face grew freckles in the summer, melting across his nose and cheeks and forehead, stark even against his tan. When he’d first arrived at the farm, he’d been pale and sunken-eyed and chapped-lipped. He looked out across the field, which was in full bloom now with its potatoes and carrots and strawberries, and a smile tucked itself into the corners of his mouth, pretty like a love letter, folded and secret.
“A lookout for runaways.” Andrew said, because this was where he’d been sitting when Neil had arrived.
“Hm.” Neil leaned forward and gently placed a palm across Andrew’s eyes. His hand was warmer than the sun. “Don’t look now, but I think you’ve found one. Whatever will you do?”
“Push him off this branch.”
“I think he’d take you with him.”
They lived a few miles from town, down a forgotten lane that Wymack maintained by pouring fresh gravel in the spring. They went to the general store a few times a month to grab flour, toothpaste, bars of soap, tea, whatever they couldn’t make themselves on the farm. Sometimes Nicky got bored of sitting around the house and took them to the town’s inn. It had a bar on the first floor open to anyone, just a small room with a few wooden stools, crooked tables, dusty floors and an old radio.
The same month that Neil had arrived, the inn had shut down, and then had opened back up under a different name. Its liquor bottles had been packaged differently and hidden under the floorboards. There had been rumours of a poster circulating the town with a painted knife, a black handprint, some name scrawled on the bottom. Then there had been Neil, running down the road and running out of steam, and none of this was connected, not really. They were just things that happened at the same time, just like Andrew had been injured the same time that Aaron had been promoted, just like the sun set whenever the Earth spun. Things didn’t necessarily have meaning unless you gave it to them.
(The truth, however, Andrew knew, because although he granted no absolution to Neil, it was still there between them, as sure as the sunrise. Truth unwavering, the heat between their mouths and clasped hands, secrets spilled in the dark where they were laid to rest. It wasn’t Andrew’s story to tell, though.)
In the summer the farm became a sort of business, because they had to make enough money to last the winter. Each of them fell into their own jobs, but it was a collective effort anyway; dinners together, breaks when the sun was too hot, evenings spent by the campfire passing around contraband bottles of gin. Andrew usually stayed in the kitchen with Abby, kneading bread and pickling vegetables and canning jams. He liked the feeling of slowly filling up their store cupboards, watching as their winter became more secure as a result of his work. He didn’t have to attach meaning to it, but he did anyway. It felt like taking the first bite of a loaf that he’d made, before anyone else got to taste: secret, indulgent, and just for him.
Neil sat on the counter sometimes, when he needed a break from the sun, and watched him work.
"I never learned how to cook.”
Andrew put his fist into the dough, rolled. Reached to flour his hands once more. “It’s not hard.”
“I think there’s something too beautiful about it. I don’t think I would do it justice. I’m not a very careful person.” He was eating strawberries, which were pooled in a cotton handkerchief, freshly picked. His lips were red.
“You don’t need to do it justice. You don’t have to do it at all.”
Neil kicked out his foot and gently nudged Andrew in the side. “Because you’ll always do it for me?”
Andrew grabbed his ankle and squeezed. “Yes.”
Neil held out a strawberry and Andrew took it into his mouth.
Even before the war, something twisted had formed in Andrew’s stomach. He'd always thought that he'd been born hungry and hollow, even though he knew he'd been raised to be that way. The others might not actually be orphans, or hadn’t started out that way, but he was. This was a truth, but it’d taken him a long time to learn its shape and its shadows. Aaron had disrupted this deep knowing: he’d burned the whole of Andrew’s world to the ground and had asked him to build it anew. To build it better, even. In theory, it was an opportunity to start fresh, to pack up the dust of all that he’d been through and to wipe it clean. In practice it had made him perhaps an uglier version of what he’d always been, because although he’d gotten used to starving, he wasn't used to having something worth protecting.
“I don’t trust you,” he told Neil, when he opened his eyes after that first awful night.
Neil looked around the room, as if there was anything to see. A small wooden dresser, sheer white curtains half-drawn across a window, the wooden chair that Andrew was sitting on, his cane propped next to him on the wall. Neil ran a hand down the quilt that covered him. It was one that Allison had made last winter, and had little yellow flowers at the center of every square.
“I’ll leave.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Neil looked out towards the window. His eyes were the color of the sky, as were the bruises under his eyes. Everything about him was blue and drowning. “As soon as I can walk, I’ll go.”
“And where will you go?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. You’re staying.”
“I thought you didn’t trust me.”
“So gain my trust, runaway.”
Neil looked at him then. If Neil was the one bleeding, raw and scared, then Andrew was the one with the knife in his hand. Truths, unwavering. Andrew would be the one to keep him there, and Neil was the one who would let him. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. They were both supposed to be dead by now. Instead, the sun was rising, and they were offering up trust to each other, tentatively, as two animals of prey would grant each other a moment’s silence during a storm.
This was Andrew saying, here is the small corner of the world that let me live, if you want it. This was Neil saying, I don’t believe you, but I want to.
So it hadn’t always been sweet and soft and unspoken. In Andrew’s dreams, Neil held the knife to Aaron’s throat. There was a deep wanting in him, left unacknowledged, but it was there nonetheless. He caught a glimpse of Neil’s scars and understood the look in Neil’s eyes. He thought about that first moment he saw Aaron’s face, his mirror, his brother. He tucked himself into the messy corners of the kitchen and Neil stayed outside, and when they bumped into each other in the hallways or sat across from each other at dinner, it was with mistrust and anger and some ugly yearning thing that was more hungry than it was kind.
Before, only Kevin had worked with the bees, because no one else wanted to be around sharp things. When Neil was finally well enough to work, in the middle of that first tender autumn, he wordlessly joined Kevin at the far side of the property, with only a plaid shirt protecting his arms and Wymack’s old bee veil. It had a hole in the bottom left corner, and had collected dust in one of the store sheds for years. Partway into the afternoon Neil entered the kitchen and asked for a cold cloth.
“Where is it?” Andrew asked, wiping the flour from his hands.
“What?”
“The sting.”
“Oh.” Neil fidgeted with the veil in his hands. “Behind my ear.”
Andrew sat him on the edge of the bathtub and mixed together baking soda and water in a dish. He tilted Neil’s head to the side and removed the stinger from the small red bump next to Neil’s left ear. Neil didn’t make a sound.
“Kevin would get you new gear, if that’s what you want to do here. Don’t be a martyr.”
“It hardly hurts. I’m fine.”
Using his ring finger, Andrew dabbed on the mixture until the red no longer showed on Neil’s skin. He did this for Kevin sometimes, because Andrew was the one who knew where the baking soda was stored, and was usually the only person around in the kitchen when Kevin arrived licking his wounds. This was where Andrew learned to be gentle, and it didn’t fit him naturally. He promised himself that if Neil refused to protect himself, then he wouldn’t patch his wounds afterwards. He put a finger under Neil’s chin and tilted it upright.
“You’re getting new gear.”
Neil blinked at him slowly. His cheeks were red, and the bruises under his eyes were gone. “Okay.”
One evening after they finished the dishes, Neil hovered his hand over Andrew’s until Andrew looked up at him. They were standing in front of the sink; outside, the sun was just dipping blowing the horizon, colouring the sky a burnt orange and rosy pink. The moon was just a faint sliver, the same color as the snow that would soon fall. Neil slowly covered Andrew’s hand, trailing his fingers across Andrew’s knuckles. One of Neil’s suspenders had fallen from his shoulder, and Andrew didn’t fix it, but his gaze kept getting stuck on it, repeatedly, maybe obsessively.
“Your hands are cracking.”
It was the beginning of December. Andrew worked in the kitchen. It was inevitable. Each winter his hands got so dry they bled and then in the summer they healed over.
Neil rubbed across his knuckles again and Andrew shivered.
“My mom used to – do you have any rosehip oil?”
The next day, a small tin appeared on Andrew’s nightstand. He brought it downstairs to Neil, who was sitting on the porch drinking tea, his hands wrapped around the mug.
“What is this?”
“Oh.” Neil put the mug down beside him. “I made it. It’s for your hands.”
“Why?”
Neil took the tin from him and Andrew sat down beside him. Neil unscrewed the tin. “It’s mostly just beeswax. Give me your hand?”
They were not accustomed to this. It didn’t come to them naturally. Andrew watched Neil’s face, but Neil kept his eyes down and rubbed the salve across Andrew’s hand. Andrew didn’t bleed once that winter.
One evening, deep into February, a car came down the forgotten road. They didn’t know anyone who owned a car; they heard it coming from miles away. Neil’s fork fell to his plate, breaking the silence.
He didn’t need to say anything. They opened up the root cellar behind the house, which was so overgrown with grass that the door was nearly invisible to those who weren’t looking for it, and Neil went to hide behind the potato sacks. Andrew turned to leave but Wymack stopped him with a hand that didn’t quite touch his arm.
“You take care of him down there. I’ll handle it.”
In the end, this is what Andrew knew of that night: his arms and legs wrapped tightly around Neil’s body, which was shivering so hard that it upset the dust on the shelf next to them. Neil’s face tucked into Andrew’s neck to hide his eyes, even though it was so dark that they couldn’t see each other. The coldness of the ground seeping into their clothes, the heat where Andrew’s hands clutched at Neil. A handgun hidden against Andrew’s back, digging into his skin where he was pushed up against the wall.
They stayed there until Wymack came to get them, the sun rising from behind him.
“I think they’ll stay away, now,” Neil said. He was in Andrew’s bed, because Andrew wouldn’t let him out of sight. Outside, snow blew past the window, the glass dulling its sound to a whisper.
“I don’t care. We’ll handle it if they come back.”
“They think I’m dead.”
Neil was on his side, a hand tucked under his cheek. Andrew was on his back, on the side of the bed closest to the door, which was not how he usually slept. A quilt was tucked around them, blue with sailboats on every square. The knit blanket that Andrew usually slept with in the winter had fallen to the ground, unnecessary with the two of them pressed together like they were.
“Sometimes I feel like I did die that night, and this is just what happens after.”
Andrew reached out a hand, trailing it across Neil’s cheek before settling it in his hair, letting the curls tangle in between his fingers. Andrew had cut it the night before, just so it would stop falling into his eyes while he was working. “Kevin would never make it into heaven.”
“Why?"
“Too irritating.”
Neil laughed, soft and lovely, and hid his smile against Andrew’s arm as though guilty.
The frost melted and it was April, it was May, it was the way Neil looked after he’d been thoroughly kissed, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed. Everything emerged from winter slightly differently than it had been before the snow fell, and this was also true for the residents of Fox Lane, the people who’d gotten so used to changing that it was as familiar as changing out of their work clothes after a long day. They hung up their clean shirts and sweaters on the clothing line and sipped iced sweet tea. They placed another chair around the fire pit, next to Andrew’s, which used to stand slightly off to the side, on its own.
The day the apples fell, they abandoned their other tasks for the day and grabbed wicker baskets from the store shed. Andrew would be making apple pie later, and apple cider. He tugged apples from the branches until his leg began to hurt, and then he settled down in the grass.
Neil held out an apple for him as if it was a gift, a treasure, and Andrew took hold of it as if it was too. Neil put his head in Andrew’s lap and Andrew took a bite of the apple – there was something pleasantly indulgent about eating an apple amongst a dozen fallen ones, as though there was no restraint necessary. Neil lifted a hand and brushed Andrew’s hair from his forehead.
“Your eyes are golden, you know that?”
Andrew rolled his eyes, looking away. There was something about having a pretty boy in his lap that felt a lot like all those apples on the ground; a sign of plenty, of having too much, of being so, so lucky.
“Shut up,” he said.
“Make me.”
After the first time they kissed, under that heavy spring moon, Andrew didn’t speak to him for two days. On the third day, he found Neil next to the beehives, pulled him into the shade, and kissed up against an oak tree. He ran his hands up underneath Neil’s suspenders, along the warm line of his jaw. He stole kisses from Neil’s mouth like he was allowed them, like they had his name on them, and maybe they did, because as soon as he pulled away Neil said, Andrew.
This was not something built on a promise, but it was there anyway, like the calm surety of finding warmth in the winter. It was the sound of the crickets each night, and the clean air that always felt new, and it was Neil, coming down the lane, always.